The improbable links between distant communities are never dull. The affirming flame that asserts the spirit of the Azores, a tiny mid-Atlantic volcanic archipelago, burns as brightly in New Bedford on the coast of the American state of Massachusetts as ever it does in Ponta Delgada. It was the whaling industry that first forged the link between these two places, but successive waves of emigration from the Azores to New England sealed New Bedford's status as the very capital of Azorean life in North America.
Gimli, a little township in rural Manitoba, about a hundred kilometres north of Winnipeg, still breathes the soul of a dozen Icelandic communities. It was a hundred and thirty years ago this autumn that the first Icelandic settlers arrived in Gimli, their new community on the shores of Lake Winnipeg aptly named after the celestial hall of the Norse gods - though the early days in Gimli could scarcely have born any resemblance to a gold shingled heaven. Gimli quickly grew, aided by the catastrophic explosion of the Askja volcano in Iceland in 1875, which sent many boats full of migrants from Vopnafjörður to join the early pioneers at Gimli. Nowadays there is as much of the spirit of Iceland's remote northeast corner on the shores of Lake Winnipeg as ever remains on the harsh lava plateaux and sparsely populated valleys of the migrants' original island home.
But few communities are so fully entrusted with preserving the flame of communal memory in quite the way that Wroclaw is. This city of more than half a million people in Polish Silesia keeps alive the very soul of prewar Lwów. Border changes in 1945 meant that Lwów found itself no longer part of Poland but now in Ukraine - where today it is known as Lviv. In the three years following the end of the war, well over a million Poles moved westward across central Europe, as Polish cities like Lwów and Wilno (nowadays the Lithuanian capital Vilnius) were evacuated. Many from Wilno settled in Torun and Gdansk, others scattered through a thousand towns and villages from Mazuria to Mazovia. But for the Lwówians there was one destination which dominated all others: the onetime German city of Breslau, which in the late spring of 1945 reassumed its Polish mantle as Wroclaw. And where once the Silesian city, particularly during the nineteen fifties and sixties, had an ambiguous relationship with the memories evoked by lost Lwów, nowadays Wroclaw proudly carries a flame kindled in a territory hundreds of miles away to the east.
In solidarity
On a sunny autumn afternoon in Wroclaw’s spacious main square, the old yellow phone boxes seem the only things unchanged from the communist period. Outside the town hall, the Polish flag flies, flanked on one side by the red and white banner of Solidarnosc (Solidarity), and on the other by the blue and gold colours of the European Union. Solidarnosc is still much remembered in this city that was among the very first to declare its support for the Gdansk shipyard workers in 1980 - especially in this twenty-fifth anniversary year.
Agnieszka, who is blind and perhaps about forty, stands by the handsome slate green statue of Aleksander Fredro, and for the fiftieth time today sings the same song to the accompaniment of music from a battered cassette recorder, which Agnieszka’s timeworn mother has balanced on the plinth of the statue. Fredro, one of Poland’s greatest comic dramatists, reclines on his plinth and presides over this banale scene, as Agnieszka beats out the lyrics of the Wroclaw Waltz.
Mkna po szynach niebieskie tramwaje przez wroclawskich ulic sto
Whether this musical aberration from 1953 that commemorates sky blue trams sliding along a hundred Wroclaw streets has finesse is of less consequence to Agnieszka and her mother Zyta than whether it draws a few zloty from the passing tourists. Agnieszka has no idea that the song harps back to the days when the good people of Wroclaw were more than slightly miffed at the 1952 edict from the authorities that all the city’s trams should be repainted in carmine and cream, colours deemed more in keeping with the dominant communist piety.
Aleksander Fredro shows his customary forbearance, benignly observing the impromptu concert. During the nearly fifty years that he has sat here in the square by the town hall, this is far from the worst thing to befall him.
Aleksander Fredro, both the man and his sculpted likeness, came from that region of eastern Poland which in 1945 became part of Ukraine. Like everything and everyone in Wroclaw, Fredro has his connections to Lwów. It was there that the untutored nineteenth century writer picked up the very practical craft of making people laugh, bucking the trend of Polish Romanticism with his stage plays, poems and fairy tales — some as popular today as they ever were. Fredro never visited Wroclaw himself. Indeed, throughout his lifetime, the city on the braided Odra river was under Prussian occupation, a place where Silesian weavers rubbed shoulders with merchants from Berlin. For years Fredro’s statue stood in his native Lwów, and it was only in 1956 that he was moved to Wroclaw. Fredro would surely have smiled that Friedrich Wilhelm III, King of all the Prussians, was toppled from his plinth to make way for a Slavic upstart from the east, and one indeed whose playful comic ways were an affront to Prussian seriousness. When Wroclaw’s sizeable Polish population flocked to see Fredro’s Pan Jowialski (‘Mr Jovial’) in the mid eighteen thirties, the Prussian press mocked the theatregoers, suggesting that they might be educated to appreciate the more refined art of august German dramatists: Lessing, Schiller and Goethe.
Zyta, who has a finer appreciation of economic principles than Agnieszka, realises the diminishing returns in Fredro’s precinct on the square. She ushers her daughter across the way, where, behind a striking modern fountain there are fresh pastures to extol the merits of Wroclaw’s municipal trams. Here, by the Lwów Café (the Karczma Lwówska in Polish) the cassette recorder is cajoled into service and sky blue tramcars fill the clear autumn air. Two tourists at the outside tables, originally inclined to make the best of these last days of sunshine, revise their plans and move inside the café to order huge plates of stuffed cabbage leaves and beer that still comes from the brewery in modern Lviv. Everywhere around the walls of the café, there are old pictures of Lwów, evoking memories of the city whose Polish population fuelled the post war recovery of Wroclaw.
Leaving Lwów
Zyta has her memories too. Memories of a childhood journey, when she was just six years old, as she and her mother with many others travelled in winter from Lwów to Wroclaw — a journey made by hundreds of thousands of Poles, encouraged by the authorities’ insistent enjoinders to move to the western territories. These recovered lands, places which had been part of pre-war Germany, were presented as a kind of El Dorado. While in the late 1840s it was mere specks of gold in a sawmill tailrace in El Dorado county in California that sparked a westward migration of impoverished hopefuls across North America, so a hundred years later it was the prospect of wealth and stability in Poland’s new western territories that under pinned a migration of similar magnitude in Europe.
Agnieszka does her bit to raise awareness about the trams, which nowadays sport whatever colours their advertising sponsors decree. Some trams carry messages from mobile phone companies and perfume houses; others are bedecked with bright red advertisements from McDonald’s. Zyta cracks the crystal glass of fragile memory with pained traces of her father’s framed image in his reservist’s uniform that once stood on the table by her childhood bed in Lwów. Only the photo - she has no memories of the man himself.
Traces, too, of the journey through the northern fringes of the Carpathians, where the weather worsened, faint snows falling on the grey convoy, flakes that enveloped both the living and the dead, for many were the weak who could not take the rigours of the journey and never reached Wroclaw. And traces of the place somewhere to the east where the convoy stopped under the shadow of a great castle wall, and where she shivered as she clung to her mother’s cape as those of the travellers who were well enough gathered round a roadside shrine and said the rosary.
The spirit of such journeys from Lwów still creeps through the streets and alleys of Wroclaw, unnoticed perhaps by the tourists who fly in for their weekends of culture, civilised comforts and cheap beer.
Zyta would like to return just once to the city where she was born, but knows that she never will. Nowadays, on just four days each week a single extra carriage is attached to the fast morning train from Wroclaw to Kraków. By some magic of cooperation between different railway administrations this lone carriage is shunted from train to train and contrives to arrive in Lviv the same day just a few minutes before midnight. Fourteen hours from the Odra valley to a place where few people now speak Polish, and where churches with extravagant silver domes speak of a different Catholicism from that which shadows Wroclaw. Fourteen hours is but a trifle compared with the forty days that Zyta took for the same journey when she moved with her mother from Lwów to Wroclaw after the war.
The waiters at the Café Lwów, alert to the limits of Agnieszka’s musical excellence, are a little anxious that clients might be deterred from taking an afternoon tea at their outside tables, and Zyta, ever sensitive to the need for harmony, leads Agnieszka across to St Elizabeth’s Church where the rays of the dipping sun still shine on the warm brick walls of the building. Agnieszka does the routine biz to good effect, while Zyta, as so often, keeps her distance. This is a solo act. Sometimes mothers must allow a little space.
Zyta recalls arriving with her mother in Wroclaw to find it full of destitute Germans all waiting for the day when they too would be transported away to the west. Mother and daughter found simple quarters in an old villa east of the city centre — no more than a space in a cellar. It was these new arrivals from Lwów and environs that shouldered the burden of rebuilding what had once been one of the most strikingly handsome cities in all of central Europe. It was these people from the east who found themselves trying to scratch a living in the infertile forestlands of Lower Silesia. Others were sent to work in mines. The lucky ones went to the coal mines, those less fortunate were sent to mine uranium at places which, once the ore was exhausted, were deleted from all the maps. Erased from maps, but not from memory.
Places like the small village where for a few years Zyta lived with her husband. There in the forested hills close by the Czechoslovak border, Marek worked in the uranium mine, providing for his wife and blind baby daughter, until the day came when, like so many other miners, Marek fell ill. “Inexplicable”, said the doctors, and sent him to the hospital in Wroclaw. When Marek died, Zyta and Agnieszka stayed in the city, taking rooms in the same road where Zyta with her mother had stayed upon their first arrival in Wroclaw. Mother and daughter joined with the migrant generation that was recreating in Wroclaw the memories of Lwów. Zyta made contact with others who had come to Wroclaw from the east, and it was some of these same people who, in late August 1980, were the very first in all Poland to stand shoulder to shoulder with the shipyard workers of Gdansk in the nascent Solidarnosc movement. The tram drivers were the first of the city’s workers to strike, parking their carmine and cream trams astride all the major intersections to block the traffic.
That was just the start of the demonstrations. Zyta and Agnieszka attended many of them. They were there on the last day of August in 1982 when twenty seven year old Kazimierz Michalczyk, who lived close by, was injured by the militia during a demonstration. And they were there a few days later at his funeral. His coffin was carried aloft through the city amid a huge crowd, while tanks and armed police stood silent sentinel all around.
The past is another country
Wroclaw had become home to Lwów’s memories. And it had become home to Lwów’s institutions. Priests who moved from Lwów to Wroclaw brought with them chalices, vestments and religious pictures, which found new homes in Wroclaw churches. Professors from the university salvaged their lecture notes, and went to Wroclaw fearfully wondering how many of their colleagues at Lwów’s Jan Casimir University might have survived the war years. Entire libraries were moved, and the red and white Baroque building of the onetime convent and school on the south bank of the Odra in Wroclaw was hurriedly redeployed to house the important Ossolinski collections of Polish art and literature. Lwów, which always had as its motto the prescript semper fidelis (‘ever faithful’), simply moved lock, stock and barrel to Wroclaw.
These are not matters that much concern Zyta and Agnieszka as they start walking home. They negotiate the pedestrian subways at plac Dominikanski, where office workers, anxious to get home, crowd aboard the multicoloured trams. The plaza takes its name from the monastery where monks once marked the pace of passing time with the Liturgy of the Hours. When Agnieszka was a child, this great space was named after Felix Dzerzhinsky, the Bolshevik leader who founded Russia’s secret police. Today it is a place where those with more wealth than Agnieszka and Zyta could ever muster visit chic boutiques and buy expensive French wines in the multi-storey glitter of the Galeria Dominikanska shopping centre.
The two women cut northeast, Agnieszka’s hand resting lightly on her mother’s arm, past the abandoned Lutheran church where Prussians once prayed, and then they pause at a small monument, self effacing in its lack of assertion, of a kneeling woman caressing the head of a dying man who lies on the ground in front of her. Every day, the two women pause thus at this very Polish Pietà. Zyta’s old grey eyes scan the inscription that hauntingly recalls what happened in the forests at Katyn in 1940 - the ruthless murder of several thousand Polish army reservists, a great number of them from Lwów and its environs. An image of the picture from her childroom bedroom back in Lwów slips fleetingly through Zyta’s mind.
Being creatures of habit, the two women make their normal diversion to the modern rotunda on the edge of the park, just in time to catch the several dozen tourists leaving the last of the day’s viewings of the Raclawicka Panorama. This is surely a moment when the Wroclaw Waltz might be deployed to good effect, and with a precise teamwork born of long practice, sky blue tramcars slide effortlessly into action. The takings are unusually good, the donors being well heeled Germans who are strolling back to their nearby hotel. They have been naturally impressed by the panorama, even if they have glossed over the details of quite who beat whom in what battle. One old German man, who as a child lived just down the road by Dominikanerplatz, reaches into his pocket and generously drops a couple of Euro coins into the small cardboard box that is on the ground at Agnieszka’s feet. But he is still bemused by the very notion that anybody bothered to transport a painting more than a hundred metres long from Lwów to the place he calls Breslau. “Where was Lwów?”, he tries to ask his wife, but his voice is drowned out by a hundred sky blue Wroclaw trams.
